Category Archives: Podcasts

My grand plans to get blogging regularly again over here are still working themselves out, but in the meantime, I recorded an episode of the Movie Club Podcast with a bunch of colleagues from Row Three (and a friend from the Director’s Club Podcast), discussing Walter Hill’s 1978 The Driver and John Frankenheimer’s 1986 52 Pick-Up, two thrillers showcasing the sleazy side of Los Angeles. I hadn’t seen either film before, so it was fun to experience them for the first time and chat about them with Kurt, Andrew, Bob, and Jim.

We did it via Google+ Hangouts and recorded it to YouTube, so you can watch the entire podcast embedded below, or you can click over here for an audio-only version. Or just subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. It’s a sporadic podcast, originally meant to be once a month, but it’s been a bit more spread out than that, thanks to everyone’s schedule, with an ever-changing cast from various websites (usually Row Three and Film Junk, though the Film Junk guys were busy this month). The next one is planned for February, discussing divisive metaphysical love stories Mr. Nobody, The Fountain, and Cloud Atlas.

Oh, you think I’m already demented? Okay. I’ll accept that. But this week, it’s official (if temporary) as I guest on the Demented Podcast, hosted by Nick Jobe of Random Ramblings of a Demented Doorknob and Steve Honeywell of 1001 Plus. This has become one of my favorite podcasts to listen to, both because the hosts have a great dynamic with each other, and because the show doesn’t focus on new releases like most other movie podcasts out there. Instead, the guest chooses a genre and each host chooses a film, usually one the other host has not seen, though that’s not necessarily required. In this case, I chose film noir, Nick chose Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Steve chose L.A. Confidential. I’d seen both of those before, but had been meaning to rewatch both, so it worked out pretty well.

Oh, I forgot to mention. The second half of the show is a trivia game – probably the best trivia game I’ve heard on any podcast ever, thanks to the amount of work that Nick and Steve do actually writing a story to hang the questions on, a story that has something to do with the genre under discussion. There’s a lot of story that never gets read, too, since there are different ways the story could go depending on how well you do on the trivia questions. Yeah, it’s fun to listen to, and nervewracking (but also fun) to play. How well did I do? You’ll have to listen to find out. Which you can do below, on Nick’s site, or by subscribing to the show on iTunes. Which you should do.

Anyway, thanks for having me on the show, Nick and Steve! I had a great time.

Many of my classic film blogger buddies are already at TCM Film Fest RIGHT NOW – I won’t be able to get there until Friday night, but in the meantime, here’s my preview post at Flickchart that runs down some of the films easily available to watch at home if you’re not able to go to the fest, and some films that aren’t easily available at all to whet your interest in making it to the fest next year. Hope to see you this year or a future one!

I need to do better about cross-referencing the stuff I write elsewhere in this little “elsewhere” column. That’s what it’s here for! I’m continuing to write TCM programming guides every month at the Flickchart blog (April’s will be…soon…I’m behind), and managing the Decades series, where we look back at films celebrating decade anniversaries this year.

For April, we looked back 90 years to 1927, a watershed year in the history of cinema with the exploding popularity of sound films, but also possibly the height of silent film artistry. All of the films featured in the post are silent (The Jazz Singer did not make Flickchart’s Global Top Ten), and it’s an embarrassment of riches. Check it out!

Video essayist Kogonada tends to let images and editing speak for themselves, and that’s precisely what he does here (with a slight bit of added Godard-esque typography, mostly to translate French audio), juxtaposing shots from various 1960-1967 Godard films to highlight recurring techniques. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who watches Godard’s early work that he had some specific things on his mind, but seeing it put together like this with excellent music and editing choices is mesmerizing and wonderful.

Chuck Jones is by far my favorite animation director of all time, and Tony Zhou is currently my favorite video essayist. Put them together? Yep, this is nine must-see minutes right here. And I’m also reminded that I need to get back to my Looney Tunes series that I started months ago and seemingly abandoned – but I didn’t, I promise! It’s just delayed.

“There’s an old story, borne out by production records, about [producer] Arthur Hornblow Jr. deciding to exert his power by handing [Billy] Wilder and [Charles] Brackett’s fully polished draft [of the screenplay for 1939’s Midnight] to a staff writer named Ken Englund. (Like many producers, then and now, Hornblow just wanted to put some more thumbprints on it.) Englund asked Hornblow what he was supposed to do with the script, since it looked good enough to him. “Rewrite it,” said Hornblow. Englund did as he was told and returned to Hornblow’s office with a new draft whereupon the producer told him precisely what the trouble was: it didn’t sound like Brackett and Wilder anymore. “You’ve lost the flavor of the original!” Hornblow declared. Englund then pointed out that Brackett and Wilder themselves were currently in their office doing nothing, so Hornblow turned the script back to them for further work. Charlie and Billy spent a few days playing cribbage and then handed in their original manuscript, retyped and doctored with a few minor changes. Hornblow loved it, and the film went into production.”

“For the refugees, a harsh accent was the least of their troubles. The precise cases, endless portmanteaus, and complex syntactical structure of the German language made their transition to English a strain. It required a thorough rearrangement of thought. In German, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence; in English, it appears everywhere but. In German, conversation as well as written discourse, like a well-ordered stream through a series of civilized farms, flows. In English, such constructions are stilted. We like to get to the point and get there fast. For a displaced screenwriter – an adaptable one, anyway – American English lend itself to the kind of direct, immediate, constantly unfolding expressivity that German tended to thwart. Linguistically at least, American emotions are more straightforward. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin puts it this way: ‘When you start a sentence in German, you have to know at the beginning what the end will be. In English, you live the sentence through to the end. Emotion and thought go together. In German, they’re divorced. Everything is abstract.’

For a flexible storyteller like Billie Wilder – or Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov, for that matter – the new mix of languages was wondrous, pregnant with sounds and bursting with meaning. Wilder’s ear picked up our slang as well as our pragmatic syntax, and his inventive, hard-edged mind found twentieth-century poetry in them. Puns, jokes, verbal color, even the modern-sounding American tones and resonances one could make in the mouth – all were deeply engaging to the young writer-ranconteur. It was exciting for him to get laughs in a new language.”